Friday, February 6, 2009

Media Pundits, You Have to Adjust Jobless Claims to the Size of the Workforce!

I think the main economic headlines you see today are about how we have the biggest unemployment claims since 1974. That can only come from clueless media pundits, because economists know this is no record and in fact Wall Street went up after the job report.

You have to know that the workforce today is about 60% larger than in 1974, and to match those job losses we'd need around a million jobless claims. Here is a graph of the adjusted jobless claims, courtesy of Scott Grannis. Note that claims are about the same as during the 1990 recession.